Somewhere on the old road, a driver in 1935 might pull over for a cold drink at a stand shaped like a colossal orange — a domed, bright-painted sphere with a window cut in the side and a man inside squeezing juice. This was programmatic architecture, and Route 66 was full of it. In an […]
Not every treasure sits on the road. Some of the greatest are a long detour off it — and this one is worth the drive. Far south of where Route 66 crosses the Texas panhandle, in Austin, the University of Texas keeps a building called the Harry Ransom Center, and inside it are two objects […]
In eastern Arizona, Route 66 passes through the only national park the highway ever ran straight through — and it is made of trees that turned to stone. The Petrified Forest is a graveyard of an ancient world. Around 225 million years ago, in the Late Triassic, this was a humid floodplain crowded with towering […]
For a certain kind of traveler, the truest color of Route 66 isn’t asphalt gray or desert gold. It’s the electric red of a neon sign flickering to life at dusk. The technology came from France. In 1910, a chemist named Georges Claude first lit a tube of neon gas at a Paris exhibition, and […]
By the late 1960s, America was building interstates as fast as it could pour concrete, and the small towns of roads like Route 66 were beginning to empty out. Just as that was happening, a CBS reporter named Charles Kuralt climbed into a motorhome and went looking for everything the new highways were bypassing. His […]
At its peak in the 1960s, the stretch of Interstate 40 approaching Tucumcari, New Mexico from the east was lined with billboards reading Tucumcari Tonight — 2,000 motel rooms — for a hundred miles in either direction. The campaign was organized by the Tucumcari-Quay County Chamber of Commerce as a way of capturing travelers who […]
A year after John Steinbeck’s novel scandalized the country, Hollywood did something almost no one expected: it filmed the thing honestly. The Grapes of Wrath reached screens in 1940, directed by John Ford for 20th Century-Fox, with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad — the ex-convict who comes home to find his family evicted and joins […]
There is a small white filling station in Dwight, Illinois, with two red pumps out front and a green roof, that quietly holds one of the road’s best records: it pumped gas for sixty-six straight years on Route 66. Ambler’s Texaco was built in 1933, a neat cottage-style station with flower boxes in the windows […]
Before most Americans had ever seen a pueblo, the Fred Harvey Company sold them one. In 1926 — the same year Route 66 was born — Harvey launched the Indian Detour, a fleet of chauffeured touring cars that carried railroad passengers off the train and out into the New Mexico back-country for one, two, or […]
Woody Guthrie grew up in Okemah, Oklahoma, in a family that fell apart slowly under the twin pressures of the Dust Bowl and his mother’s progressive illness. By the early 1930s, he was drifting — playing guitar on street corners, riding freight trains, showing up in places where transient workers gathered and playing whatever people […]
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